I've been going to the gym since last February. For a long time I had resisted the concept of going to the gym by rationalizing that anything that you can do on a machine at the gym is just an emulation of something you could do by going outside in real life. Be that as it may, the weather around here is often too hot or too cold for outdoor activities to be much fun, and while I do lead a very active lifestyle, with lots and lots of walking and carrying things around, there wasn't much that I did that really got my heart rate up, aside from the occasional chase after a bus or train. So when I realized how incredibly inexpensive it is for University staff to get memberships at the University gym facilities, I psyched myself up and decided to start going.

It was rather embarrassing at first. Due to the fact that my high school for some reason did not require marching band members to take gym class, I'd been spared from using locker rooms for the vast majority of my post-pubescent life. Trying to modestly change my clothes while a bunch of strangers strode about the locker room buck naked took a bit of getting used to. Even while wearing clothes I felt rather self-conscious at the gym, where everyone seems to be extremely tanned and toned. It didn't help that on my first day there, the girl on the elliptical next to me, who seemed to be watching an SNL rerun on her TV with her headphones, kept laughing out loud, and I had an uneasy feeling that she was laughing at me. Paranoia is awesome.

Once I conquered my modesty and my paranoia, though, I got the hang of going to the gym. I figured I would try to make a compulsive habit out of it. The things I develop compulsive habits about, like showering first thing in the morning before I do anything else, or the three places that I keep my keys, are things I rarely, rarely stray from. That is what this was going to become -- something I did not necessarily because I particularly liked it, but because it HAD to be done.

But strangely enough, I am beginning to find that I like going to the gym. I try to go every day during lunch break at work (while I have my actual lunch during one of my shorter breaks.) It's nice to be able to run off some nervous energy and get rid of whatever tension the morning might throw at me. I hop on the elliptical or the treadmill and, after the first few minutes during which my body is generally screaming DON'T WANNA DON'T WANNA DON'T WANNA, suddenly I click into gear and it's easier to keep going than it is to stop. I turn on my mp3 player and try to keep time with whatever I'm listening to, as though I am somehow propelling the band that I'm listening to. I pretend that the only important thing in life is to keep running.

It helps break up my work day, and I return from lunch relaxed but energized, and feeling clean from my shower. And I sleep way better when I've gone to the gym. My mind is nearly always worn out at the end of each day, but if my body isn't tired I'm forced to lie awake while my mind wearily runs the same anxious circles. Being physically tired puts me to sleep right away. Well, except for last night, when I managed to stay awake agonizing over something which (a) turned out to be untrue, and (b) shouldn't have been a problem even if it was. However much the gym may be helping my body, it certainly can't solve all the crazy in my mind.

Since I've been out of school, I've realized that I really need to start taking better care of myself, and this, along with eating better, is a part of that plan. I'm planning to be in this body for many years to come, so I'm trying to make it as habitable a place as I can.

(This post has ended up sounding like some kind of strange Gym Propaganda, which wasn't really the original goal. I had thought that I had more amusing things to say about going to the gym, but I guess not. You know who does have amusing things to say about going to the gym, though? Alexa and Miss Doxie, two of the most hilarious bloggers on the internet. Go read them!)

I have renewed my ALA membership. I have registered for the conference. I have booked a flight. I have arranged to split a hotel room with Supervisor of Awesome.

I am going to Midwinter!

Now I just have to figure out where the airport is, which hotel we're staying at, how I will get from one to the other, and whether the conference is anywhere near the restaurant that I was so enamoured of last time I was in Philly.

Actually, the process of getting those links answered most of those questions for me. Still have to talk about the hotel, though.

I am excited!

A few days ago, Charlotte tagged me for a meme. I don't usually do memes on this website, preferring instead to post that kind of thing over on my livejournal, but this one involves linking to old posts, and there's a much bigger (and better quality) selection over here. And I like linking to old Age-Old Songs posts. It makes me feel like there's some use for all these archives.

The meme is as follows:
Post links to five of your previously written posts, relating each to the key words: family, friends, yourself, your love, and anything you like.

I was chatting yesterday with a co-worker about children and parenting, and I told her how glad I was that my parents had not let me be a brat -- that they'd shown me the importance of hard work and taught me that money isn't some magical thing, but something that you have to be responsible about. Here's a post about my family's grocery shopping when I was a child, and how that has shaped who I am today.

It is hard to pick out any one post about friendship, because all my friends have kept me going in so many different ways and no one post really sums that up. But here is a post about how visiting a friend in Colorado made me reflect on my changing friendships, and how lucky I am.

There are so many posts I could link to about myself, depending on how I wanted you to see me -- accomplished? geeky? melodramatic? depressed? exuberant? You can find all of those here, but I'm going to direct you to one explaining why I sometimes try to imagine myself as a robot.

I'm not going to interpret love as romantic love because (a) I have always been very private about my lovelife, so there's not much here on that topic, and (b) at this point that would mean linking to a post about one of my exes, which is kind of asking for me and possibly others to feel very awkward. So never mind that. My love of nature and and especially the hills of western Massachusetts and central New York, is one of the things that keeps me going, and sometimes I miss that here in the city.

And finally, a few years ago I visited Copan, Honduras, and while I was there I wrote about the power in naming things, an idea that has always fascinated me. (I was just looking at my posts from Copan and thinking it was funny that I had skipped so many apostrophes when I was typing. Then I remembered that I had never figured out where the apostrophe was on the keyboards I was using, which looked like regular English keyboards, but a lot of the punctuation keys corresponded to Spanish punctuation. I had meant to correct my posts when I got back home, but at this point I think I'll leave them that way, to remind me.)

This took a lot longer to write than a regular post. That is because I am completely neurotic and had to read through my archives to find just the right post, even for the last question where I could pick whatever I wanted. I am crazy, yes.

The meme also said something about tagging five people, but I am not much into tagging, so if you would like to do the meme, go for it!

Today, my friend and supervisor, the one who is leaving, asked me if I was planning to go to ALA Midwinter. I replied that I hadn't really thought about it. Apparently she and at least one other person in the department are planning to go, and after some coaxing and poking I too am looking at lists of discussion groups and checking the prices of flights. I'm still not sure if I'll go, but it does seem like a good idea. The area of the library field that I am most interested in is a pretty small world, so I'd be likely to meet some people who would be very good to know. And I could figure out what it's like to go to an ALA conference while having some people to tag along with.

I am irrationally nervous about the whole endeavor, because that's sort of my thing these days, apparently, but I am very lucky to be surrounded by encouraging people and I should really take advantage of that fact. If someone wants to take me under her wing -- specifically, someone who is very good at accomplishing her personal career goals -- I should most definitely be saying YES PLEASE TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW. I also keep telling myself that if I keep working on this career thing, it'll eventually get to be as second nature to me as school is now. I have started to consider myself a nervous person, but I am trying to remind myself that I am only nervous in some situations, and the more I put myself in those situations, the more comfortable I become. I have always been able to rise to the occasion before. I can do it still. I just need to try, and not let myself be limited by my own crazy fears, and the career-related inertia that I seem to be feeling these days.

Apparently my grandmother won a slow-cooker that she didn't particularly want in a church raffle of some sort, so she gave it to me on Thanksgiving. I've wanted a slow-cooker for a while, but it was on the list of things I will get when I no longer have roommates (see: food processor), because we really do not have space to store one anywhere in our kitchen, and also because I'm dreadfully paranoid that my roommates will do it harm in some way, even though these roommates have never broken anything of mine (yet.) Clearly I am still traumatized by memories of sharing a kitchen in college.

But obviously I am not one to turn down a free slow-cooker, even though the space issue means that it lives in my bedroom closet when not in use (incidentally, this also solves the issue of roommates potentially breaking it). So I brought it home, and then yesterday I went out and bought Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker, because while I know that things other than pot roast can be made in a slow-cooker, I didn't really know what those things were, other than, say, stew. The cookbook informed me that I can make things like stuffed peppers and stuffed squash in the slow-cooker. This is good because I have been looking for a good recipe for vegetarian stuffed pepper for a long time. Thanks, cookbook!

It also told me that I could use it to make a pot pie. It never crossed my mind that you could use a slow-cooker for anything bready, possibly because I had been thinking of it largely as a stew-and-potroast-cooker. The pot pie revelation was also fantastic because, if you could rewind my life to Friday night, you'd find me on the phone with a friend discussing uses for turkey, because apparently her mother bought a 19-pound turkey for four people, and therefore they had a disturbing amount of leftover turkey at their disposal. "When I was a kid," I told her "I remember my mother would use leftover turkey to make turkey soup and turkey pot pie." Then I paused thoughtfully (hungrily?) "I should really make myself a veggie pot pie sometime. I probably have a recipe around somewhere..."

Fast-forward to Sunday. I can make pot pie in the slow-cooker? And I have all the ingredients in the house, except chickpeas? YAY!

(Side note: whenever I try to type "pot pie" I keep almost typing "poet pie." Obviously I type one of these words more often than the other. Poets are not for eating.)

So I made pot pie in the slow-cooker. The most difficult part of the procedure was leaving it alone for five hours, because I am a neurotic (see: browning tofu.) The cookbook and the slow-cooker instruction manual both sternly forbade me from opening the lid while it was cooking, because apparently it takes a while to build up the heat in there and every time you lift the lid you can lose twenty minutes of cooking time. So even though the whole point of slow-cookers is that they cook things UNATTENDED, and I could have gone across town and run some errands, or read a book, or written a better blog post, somehow I was still peering intently through the condensation on the lid, trying to see if it was cooking evenly, or if it might be too dry, or if it looked hot, or whatever. Clearly there should be a support group for this sort of thing.

Thankfully at five hours I was allowed to take the lid off to put the crust on -- a biscuity batter which I just dropped on top, and which rose and browned quite nicely. And then an hour later it was done. Next time I might substitute tofu for some of the chickpeas, which ended up being the dominant vegetable in the dish. And I might use a bit more vegetable stock, because I like my potpies with a bit more gravy. But all in all, it was a good recipe, and I look forward to trying more.

Cure for whininess:

1. Pour a small glass of Irish cream. (Mmmm, tasty.)
2. Drink, while watching an episode of Firefly. (You think you have problems? Try being a cowboy in space!)
3. Listen to "Get Over It" by OK Go. (Ain't it just a bitch, what a pain, well it's all a crying shame, what left to do but complain...)
4. Sleep.
5. Repeat as necessary.

Sometimes my problems are boring even to me. *rolls eyes at self*

Time to run errands now!

I don't even know if I want to talk about this, but since I haven't done anything all day and it's on my mind, I suppose I will anyway.

Actually, I spent about half an hour typing and then deleting paragraphs, but everything I'm thinking about is so convoluted right now that I decided a list would probably be the simplest way to explain this.

1. The sorts of jobs that don't follow you home don't pay enough to allow you to make yourself much of a home, anyway.
2. There doesn't seem to be a place in the professional world for people who don't have this drive to climb the ladder, attend conferences, network, or be in charge.
3. Whenever I look at job postings, I'm paralyzed by this sense that I don't know how to do anything that I would be asked to do at any professional job.
4. I have a horrible sense of guilt that I am living selfishly. I am not interested in doing anything vastly important for society in my job, nor am I balancing that out by planning to do anything vastly important at home, like raising children.
5. I have a horrible sense of guilt that I have a great deal of intelligence and talent and I'm not really using them because I don't have this burning need to accomplish.
6. I am irritated with myself because really, would it be so hard to be interested in something that has the potential to earn money? So, something other than poetry or hand crafts or trades?
7. I hate loving a city, and a region of the country, where the cost of living is so ridiculous that I am still living with roommates (out of necessity, rather than choice.)
8. I feel torn between furthering my career (moving from place to place for education, internships, etc.) and setting down roots.
9. Some days it seems so difficult to just behave like a human (communicate with people well, adapt to change, learn from mistakes, make intelligent decisions) that I do not know how I will ever survive in the professional world.
10. I am mad at myself because ultimately, this is all a question of drive, which I do not seem to have.

And I don't even know what I have to say about all that, but it seems like a lot of my life is sort of up in the air until I manage to get a handle on all this nonsense.

At least I have a job. I do keep telling myself that. Things can be up in the air as long as I can pay the bills.

Today Cynthia and I have mainly sat around watching a marathon of America's Next Top Model reruns, and eating Thanksgiving leftovers (and knitting, which has really been the only productive thing about today.) And I just have to say, it is lovely to have friends with whom you can just sit around and watch TV and feel perfectly content, no pressure to go out and find ways to entertain ourselves.

Of course, we are going to go out now, to see Sarah, but we are well rested up as a result of our lazy day.

I am thankful that I am so well-loved, by both my family and my friends (who are often nearly family.) I am thankful that I can never feel alone for very long before someone calls or emails and reminds me that I'm not. I am thankful that I love so many people so fiercely, and that they know and trust that I do.

Dealing with people is one of the greatest difficulties of my life, but it can also be one of my greatest joys, when things go well and I find wonderful people like these.

Last night I dreamed that I kept finding pieces of colored glass in my food as I ate it, and for some reason I kept eating as I nervously picked them out. I had this uneasy feeling that I had done something to deserve this glass-laced food, so I was just going to have to eat it and pick it out the best I could.

I also dreamed that I was with my family in a car, driving on a bridge over a river. As we got onto the bridge, we saw in the water the flaming wreckage of crashed airplanes, several on each side of us. My mother floored the accelerator to try to get to the other side of the bridge so we couldn't see them anymore, and I couldn't decide which was more horrifying, the plane wrecks or the speed with which we were careening through traffic, as though the planes would stop existing if only we couldn't see them anymore.

(Conveniently, in dreams, things really do stop existing when you can't see them anymore.)

That is all for today, because I have baking to do, and also laundry, and also cleaning. My advice to you all: try not to go into any supermarkets today. I did, and regretted it. Well, not completely, because now I have food, but still... sheesh.

Today was uneventful, except that there were mixed nuts in the fridge at work, leftover from a party the other day. So naturally I took a handful of them outside to feed to Crazyface, who sat down next to my feet, held my hand under his nose with little squirrel paws, and proceeded to eat nuts out of my hand like a dog with its face in a bowl of kibble. Some passerby stopped and asked if they could take a picture. "Are the squirrels always this friendly?" they asked. "Not all of them," I said, "but this one will eat out of your hand any day of the week." Later, when I'd doled out the last nuts from my pocket and turned to walk away, Crazyface pounced my foot to try to keep me from leaving. "HEY," I said. "No more food, okay?" I turned my coat pocket inside out, as though he could possibly comprehend this demonstration of my foodlessness. He followed me for a few more steps before going off to do whatever it is that squirrels do when they are not begging me for food.

It snowed a little bit today, too. None of it accumulated, but it was still kind of exciting. Snow is the only thing that redeems this dreariness.

And that is all the excitement that I really have to share today (note to self: tell some stories that are not about squirrels).

One more day of work till the holiday!

I'm really unnecessarily tired for a Monday. Work was a bit hectic, certainly, but not that bad. I think perhaps eagerness for the holiday is making all intervening days seem slow and wearying.

But at least, after today, I have something in particular to do every day for the rest of the week. Tomorrow Sarah will be in town, so we will probably get together and do... something. Knowing us, possibly play Guess the Colors while her husband looks on in dismay.

Wednesday, I get out of work half an hour early (I stayed half an hour late today, so hooray for flexing time.) Then I am going to bake a dessert for Thanksgiving. (Okay, possibly this does not sound like much of an event, but I have been anticipating baking all weekend, as though this were something I could get done in advance if I planned well enough. I was totally psyched about finding a recipe I wanted to use, and then had to remind myself that if I do not want it to be STALE, possibly I should WAIT A FEW DAYS. Sheesh.)

Thursday, Cynthia arrives, and we head to my parents' house to stuff ourselves silly. Later, we head back to my place with tupperwares full of leftovers. If history holds, we will watch a marathon of That 70's Show while repeatedly exclaiming over how full we are.

Friday will be a lazy day, but Cynthia and I will go out in the evening with Sarah and her hometown posse.

Saturday, Cynthia and Sarah will leave town, but with luck I'll have plans with Kat.

Sunday I will probably have to recover from the most socializing I have done in a while.

Right now part of me wants to work on a skirt that I've been altering, but I am just not feeling energetic enough. I think tonight is a good night for lying in bed and reading, especially since it is cold in here. I am feeling a little whimpery, internally, and curling up cozily is a good way to combat that, I think.

Back in October, Peter wrote about artists tapping the same idea over and over again, trying to approach a perfect portrayal of that story. The idea stuck with me because I do that all the time.

With poetry I think it's a little different, because poems don't always end up being about what you think they're about when you start. My writing group uses the word "trigger" to describe the idea or inspiration that started you writing something. Sometimes as a poem progresses it steers away from that original idea and never returns to it. Sometimes the language and the ideas become stronger and finer, and it's best to let the trigger fade to the background, or to remove it entirely.

The advantage of the disappearing trigger is that sometimes, you can write several poems inspired by the same feeling or story, without anyone knowing that they're all coming from the same place. You can keep being bothered and inspired by one idea because you never really wrote about it at all. You ended up writing poems about other things. (This is comforting to me, because I always have this vague superstition that there are only so many stories inside of me, only so many things that I have to tell, before I am dried up and done.) When you finally do write the poem that encompasses that idea, it doesn't gnaw at you anymore. You need to be bothered and inspired by something else.

That happened to me this spring and summer when I kept trying to write poems about disappearing bees, and kept writing poems about family, and school shootings, and who knows what else. I never did write a poem about the bees. (One of them might come back to being about that; right now it is leading me in circles.)

Of course, sometimes the trigger doesn't disappear at all, and it becomes abundantly clear to anyone who reads your writing often that you have a group of poems all coming from the same place, but each one only tells a little fragment of what you're trying to get at, so you keep writing. Right now I keep writing poems about the city, because beneath the surface there is a small part of me that finds the city life strange, astonishing, and a little bit devastating, even as I live my daily life with a certain degree of contentment and plan to continue to live this way. I keep mining that part of me for writing, trying to articulate what it is that I really mean by that, and each poem is like a bit of a collage which might in its entirety be the nearest sort of perfection I can achieve. And this, I think, is how people manage to write entire manuscripts.

I'd be content to have a stack of poems that together made me feel like I'd said all I needed to about one idea. But how brilliant must it be to have just one thing that stands on its own and says exactly what you need it to say? A slimmer achievement, for sure, but stunning in its conciseness.

I tried to do a bit of writing today. I've been ignoring poetry for a couple weeks, since the last time my group met. Right now, in the pile of unfinished business, I have:

-A poem I wrote in the spring and brought to workshop at the beginning of the summer. I got a lot of very good feedback on it, and each time I revise it a great deal changes. It's cleaned up a lot now; I got rid of extraneous characters and some dull language, and I keep rethinking the order of its various components. It's been a really awful process on some level because we took out a LOT of crap when we first workshopped it, which was great, but once I had it pruned down to the best language and images the trickiest part was getting them to flow together again. It just seemed like a collection of fragments. Weaving them together again has been a monthslong project. Recently the poem has started to shape itself a bit like a sonnet; I am trying to be aware that it could be one without trying to make it one, because that never goes well.

-A poem that I wrote just a month or two ago and cannot edit for the life of me. It's not because I think it's good; I just don't know what it is, whether it's just junk, whether it's overly mopey, whether it's restrained, whether the language is careful, whether it makes any sense at all. It's sort of an enigma to me, and I really just need them to look at it. I meant to bring it to group earlier this month, but I didn't get to kinkos in time so I ended up there with nothing to offer but banana bread.

-A poem that is over a year old now and which has parts that I like very, very much even though I sort of despise all the rest of it. The parts I like very well are lines that got me out of bed at night to scrawl them on a paper napkin in the dark. The parts I hate are the lines that I put in later to sort of frame it. The lines I wrote that night don't really stand on their own, but whatever I add to it just seems explanatory -- the language isn't on the same level. I have expanded the whole thing and cut it to pieces again, and I stopped being able to see what was important to keep, because Kat was good enough to look at it for me and at that point it was just not clear anymore what it was about. At the end of our conversation about that she sent me a draft which I thought made some kind of sense, but I haven't looked at it for a while because I knew I needed to look at the whole thing with fresh eyes. I've probably given it time enough, and should dig it out of my email again.

-A poem that we workshopped in October, and people had such a wide variety of reactions to it that I cannot decide whether to fix little things here and there, or tear it all apart and reevaluate the direction of the whole thing. Every time I look at it I feel vaguely overwhelmed about it, so I think it needs more time to sit before I can really do anything about it.

-A poem that I first wrote a few weeks ago, and which is at the moment awful, but it is becoming something. Today I managed to cut some crap out of it and add a few lines, and I think those lines get to the heart of the thing, so I have something to build on. What's nice about this one is that it's easy to see what needs to be done. Parts of it are crappy and need to be taken out, but right now they sit as placeholders for what will come. I sort of know where I want it to go, but it hasn't taken on a very hardened form, so I feel able to mold it in any number of ways. It's much later in the process that things will get trickier.

And there are others, but they feel less pressing right now. Revising is the worst and biggest part of poetry (maybe of any sort of writing, but I wouldn't know) and it is the part that I need to work on the most. Fortunately, there is always more to do, and so I just keep plodding along.

When I went to make breakfast this morning there was a strange man in my kitchen. This is what happens when you have roommates: they have guests over sometimes, and maybe you don't actually meet those guests because they arrive late and you are already trying to sleep, and the next thing you know you're all bleary-eyed and trying to make conversation with someone whose name may or may not have been mentioned to you at some point in the recent past.

I understand that it is at least equally awkward to be the guest in question when some surly roommate that you haven't been introduced to walks into the kitchen where you're brushing your teeth for some reason, so I tried to be friendly. "Hi," I said, nodding amiably. "Hi," he responded, rinsing his toothbrush and looking awkward. I immediately turned my entire attention to heating my english muffin and hash browns. I am not terribly sociable at seven in the morning.

A few minutes later, my hash browns and facon* were heated, my english muffin was toasted and buttered, and my cider was poured. I was putting my frying pan in the sink when the guy reappeared in the kitchen for some reason. "That's a filling breakfast you have there," he said, insightfully.

"Yes," I responded, but then, realizing that might seem terse, I added "It's... nice... to have... that sort of thing... for breakfast."

"Yeah, I find it's good to have breakfast, you know?"

"I... yes," I said, trying to disentangle myself from the vicious cycle of repeating each other's sentences with minor variations. I walked back to my room to eat breakfast over email. I suppose sometimes it's nice to be reminded of how much I appreciate my usual silent mornings.

*fake bacon. thank you, morningstar farms.

Here is the kind of week it has been, as I explained to a co-worker on my way out of work today. Every night I get home and I think, crap, I have to figure out something to have for dinner. But I can't really think of anything I particularly want, I just know that I ought to eat something. So either I cook, or I heat up something frozen from Trader Joe's, either way it's nothing hugely thrilling, but it does the job, and then I find various ways to occupy myself until bed. Then the next day, as the afternoon wears on, I think, I have to figure out something for dinner. And then I think, didn't I just do this yesterday? I made dinner. It's time to do it again already? As though making dinner were some chore that you should only have to do once a month, like paying bills.

For the record, I don't usually feel that way about food, or cooking, or about my leisure time. But that is the kind of week it has been.

The weekend is looking blissfully empty, so I am going to come up with some fun projects. Possibly I'll even put together some decent posts.

I found out today that one of my favorite supervisors is taking a new -- and wonderful -- job. She is a compassionate and dependable manager and has really been a rock for me these past few months. I am going to miss her a lot.

In happier work news, there is a professional development opportunity coming up that I'm excited about. I'm pretty sure I can get both time away from work and possibly also some funding to pursue it. That's one thing I'm very grateful for about my workplace.

And in completely different news, a friend emailed out pictures of her new Maine Coon kitten, who is adorable. I got to play with him a bit a couple weekends ago, and he is gorgeous, gentle, and fearless.

Today I did an experiment in internet avoidance. I didn't turn on the computer before work. I didn't turn it on after work until about an hour ago, after I'd made dinner and some lunches for next week. I found myself feeling disconnected, but also peaceful, as though the glow of this screen were like a radio always crackling in the back of my head. Once I turn the computer on it's hard to figure out quite where the hours go, and I think this must be how some people are about television. I am not -- if I'm not enjoying what I'm watching, I switch channels, and if I don't see anything I particularly want to watch, I turn it off. But on the internet I can always keep going, even if I'm bored, just clicking from familiar site to familiar site.

What I missed most about having the computer on was the people: the old friends who I largely keep in touch with by email and IM, and the people who I "know" through blogging. It's nice that they can just say hi quickly, or tell me what's going on in their lives, even though, strangely, there's no one who lives close enough to just go grab lunch on an average weekend. It's nice to be able to reach out and feel connected. But it's nice, too, to be able to withdraw and choose isolation, when it suits me.

So I was sitting here all uninspired and playing Guess the Colors, which is the same thing as the board game Mastermind, and which I haven't played since I was a kid, and which Sarah sent me the link to because she is always trying to prevent me from getting anything done (this is the girl who introduced me to websudoku, people, and anything that keeps track of your best time and has charts to show you how to compare to others, is incredibly addictive, I have to say.) And I was thinking, I have no idea what I am going to post today! Because all I have done today is go to work, come home, and play this game, and I have this list of post topics in front of me but I just do not feel like I have the energy to write about any of them.

Then I clicked on Incredible Megs, and she was having the same sort of day! Let's talk about Megs for just a moment. She has a polka-dotted car. She has two cute dogs. She flies the Jolly Roger in her front yard. And this month (and hopefully in the future) she is posting a poem every Sunday, which is awesome for me because I am not as well-read in poetry as I wish I were, her tastes are similar to mine, and she very often introduces me to things I really enjoy. She also writes really insightfully about her everyday life.

So, in addition to my periodic favorite-blog-recommendation (see? I told you it would become a feature this month!) I will tell you just a few things about today:

I fed Crazyface another candy bar. He continues to amuse me.
I finished the final buttonhole on my coat, while I was on break at work, because it was raining today and I wore the coat anyway and stuffed a needle and thread in my pocket on my way out.
Cynthia is pretty sure she is coming to visit for Thanksgiving, which I am very excited about.
House is on, so I am going to go watch that. I am not pleased that the first commercials with Christmas music are appearing, though.

That is all.

I honestly don't know where today went. It is amazing how quickly days go by when you can do things besides lying in bed.

I did spend plenty of time lying in bed, sleeping late, and had a long series of dreams featuring the following:
-swimming across a river on some sort of mission with a bizarre array of creatures
-a parking garage by the Charles with huge piles of cigarette lighters in it so that Bostonians could more easily protest by lighting things on fire
-a blizzard which made it nearly impossible to get back to the Boston side of the Charles
-being on the staff of Dr. Gregory House
-a childhood friend seeking medical attention from me while I was working in that capacity
-condo-hunting in north Medford (my thought process was remarkably lucid in this part as I weighed the pros and cons of the unit)
-a mildly psychic landlord who tried, and failed, to use her power to manipulate people

Then I spent my day paying bills and updating my address book, because clearly nothing that happened today was going to be as exciting as all that. But let me tell you, between buying my Christmas cards back in September, and having my address book completely updated, I am SO SET to do Christmas cards this year. All I have to do is buy awesome stamps. Hey, when you only have three traditions that you really care about, you might as well do them right. (The others are both food-related, in case you were curious.)

I suppose this post is just chock-full of stories that I could elaborate on, but today I'm going to pretend to be mysterious and not do that. Unless you reeeeally want details of some of the dreams or Christmas traditions or something, in which case, if you ask, perhaps I will. Just bear in mind that all stories appear interesting until you've heard them.

I woke up this morning feeling somewhat less bad and spent the morning weaning myself onto gatorade and crackers and walking around my room trying to make sure I felt sturdy enough to go out. And luckily, I did, and I had a lovely afternoon and evening at a poetry reading listening to one of my favorite poets (and two others who I didn't know as well), and at an afterparty chatting with a lot of my friends from workshop and some other people I'd just met.

The party was one of those nearly indescribable things, but I will try. There was a lovely, huge old house; outside it, horses and the smell of horse, beyond that, forest and the smell of forest. Inside, the glow of people, hosts with that enviable ability to throw a perfectly effortless party, a spread of irrestistible food: ham and turkey, rolls, green salad, noodle salad, couscous salad, nuts and cheeses and olives. Champagne toasts and conversation over nuts and cheeses and olives, with three dogs lying at our feet, conversation about childhoods and religions, with people I learn so much from, people who seem to think I have something to offer them, too. A sort of pastoral dream, reminding me that while I love the city for its convenience now, I can't stay here forever -- I know where I need to return.

Well, tonight some friends and I had arranged to have Soylent Green Night, during which we would watch the movie and also have a potluck which was to include our interpretations of Soylent Green. As far as I know most of us were leaning towards ingredients like soy, lentils, and green things, and away from "people". We are mainly vegetarian, and not generally murderous. Most days.

The bad news is that I woke up this morning with a lot of stomach pain and unpleasant dizziness and nausea, and because I'm an idiot I at first thought that I was just hungry. In, you know, a more violent way than usual. That was the theory I stuck with while I showered and dressed and prepared breakfast in a great deal of discomfort. However, when my stomach reacted to breakfast something like this, and muscle aches and chills decided to join the party, I came to the conclusion that I was probably getting sick. After an hour of lying in bed I began to feel a bit better, decided I was being lazy and overreacting and should probably get to the supermarket for ingredients already. But after raising myself to a vertical position I decided that I was horribly wrong and went right back to lying around in bed. After sending an email bailing on Soylent Green night, that is.

The happy news, for me, is that my friends want to reschedule rather than doing it without me, which is incredibly sweet, especially since it took us about an eternity to get this planned in the first place, and our next collective free weekend is in December.

The less happy news is that the day goes by really slowly when you can't do anything except lie around in bed (without actually sleeping). My head still feels a little bit too unwell for reading or television, and I am only making occasional brief trips to the computer (this post has been in process now for several hours.) The less happy news for all of you is that nothing really happens on a day when I don't leave the house because of some sort of stomach flu, so in order to post my standards have gone down dramatically, seeing as how I have (a) spent a paragraph talking about my sickness, and (b) linked to a LOLcat. Sorry.

But as long as I have already gone down that road: maybe it is just because I'm fond of Field of Dreams, but I am highly amused by this one.

Everyone, have a better day than me.

Ways in which my computer owns me:

-Whenever I buy a book, I enter it in LibraryThing. Whenever I read a book, I enter it in AllConsuming.
-Whenever I hear about a movie or TV show I'm interested in seeing, I add it to my Netflix queue. Whenever I watch a movie, I enter it in AllConsuming. Whenever I watch a movie or TV show, I rate it on Netflix.
-Whenever I buy a CD, I rip it to my computer, I transfer it to my MP3 player, I add it to my iTunes library, and I enter it on Rate Your Music.

I am not that obsessive about Flickr or del.icio.us yet, but give me time.

How does your computer own you?

Hi! I only got home just a little while ago. My mom and I were out at this talk about genealogy that was arranged by the alumni club at Simmons (also known as the college where I got my library degree.) This is an improvement over the events planned by Colgate (the college where I got my bachelor's) which are mainly excursions to local bars. Since I am perfectly capable of going out to bars myself, with people I actually know, rather than random people who attended Colgate thirty years before me, I don't tend to take advantage of those opportunities.

This genealogy thing, on the other hand, was quite useful. I know this because my mom took a lot of notes. Honestly my mom and sister are the family genealogists; when I want to know something I usually ask them because I'm too lazy to look things up, and really why bother when they've probably already done it? Which is not to say that I don't try to be helpful. I did get us into this talk, after all.

Genealogy is like a game with really, unnecessarily complicated rules. The census includes everyone... except the people it doesn't include. Naturalization papers are incredibly useful starting in a certain year, but before that are worthless. Same thing with passenger lists. Lots of information is made up, but some is more likely to be accurate than others. Marriage certificates, for instance, are likely to be accurate because the people getting married can give you the information themselves. Death certificates? It's anyone's guess who ends up filling those out. It's certainly not the deceased, that's for sure.

The combination of too many places to look and too little actual information is what starts to make my brain leak out my ears when I start thinking about genealogy, so I think I'll continue with my enthusiastic support of the people actually doing the work.

In other news, I totally sliced off the side of my right index fingertip with a scalpel today at work. OW. Normally when I just nick myself with a scalpel, even if it bleeds a little I don't fill out an injury report (even though I should, technically, for any injury that draws blood.) Since this removed most of a chunk of skin, I did pick up the form I need to fill out. As far as I am concerned, having to do paperwork is a significant motivation to avoid getting hurt. It's right up there with "getting hurt HURTS." So hopefully my adventure with the yellow form will keep me from doing this again. (It's very stupid, actually. Imagine you are holding a scalpel in one hand, and holding down a ruler with the other. You are going to use the ruler as a straight edge to cut against. The thing with that is that you want your fingers to NOT BE HANGING OFF THE RULER in the path of the scalpel, because that's how you cut off pieces of skin, fingernail, etc. I've done this before, but I've only ever nicked myself, not made an actual slice. Something new every day, I guess.)

So of course I am eating a lot of candy cane Hershey kisses to soothe my injured finger. Which I really wish didn't have a giant band-aid on it, because it is making my typing a lot worse than usual. Also, when I went to take out my contacts this evening, I realized that I NEED that finger to take out my contacts. It was very, very difficult and strange trying to do it without. Has it ever crossed your mind how you would get your contacts out if you lost use of one of your hands during the day? Obviously this is not that intense, but it sort of made me think.

People, it is almost Friday!

The most important thing I have to share with you today is this: Squirrel Fishing.

It was discovered by one of my co-workers today, who told my fellow squirrel-feeding co-worker about it, who told me about it. "This MUST be done," she said, almost at the same time that I said "I'm TOTALLY doing that to Crazyface." Now, you may be thinking, that's horrible, Amanda, how could you be so mean to your innocent, furry friends? To which I say: the squirrels around my workplace are brats. These are squirrels that refuse DONUTS. They deserve to have a little trick played on them now and again.

Last night I got only one of the two remaining buttonholes done, because I realized that I had to clean the gerbil cage, which doesn't take very long, but to do that I let them out to play in my room for a while (which tires them out a little, thankfully) and I cannot get anything done while they are out, because they are always trying to destroy everything I own. Bedskirt. Bed linens. Towels. Furniture. Books. The only boundary I have left is the clothes hamper. All the other stuff doesn't have to leave my room, and no one but me has to come in here and see how all my stuff has been attacked by tiny little teeth. But I have to wear my clothes places and I don't want to look like a vagrant and I can't replace them all the time so the hamper is still off-limits, and so help me it'll stay that way.

I can't get anything done while they are out because they are always either making suspicious noises that make me think they are destroying something, so I have to track them down to make sure the "something" isn't in my hamper, or they are silent, which is even more suspicious, and makes me believe they are still destroying things, only more stealthily, and so I still have to track them down, only it is harder because of the silence.

Technically it is mostly Calamity doing the destroying. Serenity instead tries to eat my toes, which HURTS, but she seems to think they are delicious candy, so whenever they are out, I end up perched in my chair with my feet tucked well above the ground, trying to coax Calamity from across the room not to destroy things. It is delightful.

One advantage of having both hardwood floors and gerbils is the opportunity to play Gerbil Shuffleboard. This works better with Serenity than Calamity because Calamity has quicker reflexes and regains his traction faster, while Serenity tends to go half-limp when she's being handled, so she slides pretty far with a gentle push. I should really write out a point system on the floor. (In case you are concerned about the well-being of this small Toe-Eating Monster, who seems to be caught in the clutches of a person who is thinking of taking up Squirrel Fishing as a hobby, I will tell you that she doesn't seem terribly bothered by it.)

Today, after I came home from work, I found that they had stuffed bedding into the end of their water bottle so that it completely drained and leaked all over the cage, which I now have to put dry bedding in, AGAIN. Sigh. On second thought, maybe I will practice my squirrel fishing on them.


(Well, of course they look innocent...)

I have important news for you all: the candy cane flavored Hershey kisses are back! I bought a bunch at CVS today. This year I am going to freeze a bag so that I have some for the non-Christmas season, because those things are awesome.

Today I hurt my right thumb in two different ways: by slamming it in a drawer and by slicing it with a scalpel (which, yes, is another part of my job. Scalpels!) Sorry, Right Thumb! I love you! To prove my love I will eat a candy cane Hershey kiss in your honor. I suppose since you are not part of my digestive system you won't fully appreciate it, but it's the thought that counts, right? And from now on I'll think really hard about NOT HURTING MYSELF. Ow.

My five-year-warranty thermos did not leak on the way to work today, for which I am incredibly grateful, because I smell icky enough at the gym anyway without my gym clothes having been soaked in curry. Mind you, I did not eat the contents of the thermos, nor actually make it to the gym, because I forgot to take my morning break (during which I usually eat lunch) and then spent my lunch break (when I usually go to the gym) going to lunch with a co-worker. If I had not been incredibly lazy I could have gone to the gym after work, but it was chilly out and nearly dark and I just wanted to go home and make some macaroni and cheese.

I did in fact make macaroni and cheese, so I am not that lazy. It is delicious and comforting. And I can bring it to work for lunches, more easily than soup. I froze the rest of the soup, in a ziplock, which may or may not have been wise, but I really can't spare a tupperware for a long time in the freezer. Plus I'm not sure I had one big enough. Oh well. It just has to not leak for long enough to freeze solid.

I have been informed that tomorrow during my first hour of work I will be photographed for an informational slide show. Apparently in order to demonstrate proper handling of books, I will be shown washing my hands, and also studying at a carrel where books are properly stacked. No doubt this will jumpstart an incredibly successful career in modeling. *tosses frizzy hair haughtily* ...or not. (See: too lazy to go to the gym, above.)

I never did finish those buttonholes on my coat, by the way. On Saturday I wore the coat out despite only one of four buttonholes being done, because it is the only thing I have that is both warm and water-resistant. On Sunday I meant to finish them but got distracted by Computer Drama, errands, cooking, etc. Yesterday I got one more done after looking at the weather and realizing that it was going to be cold and rainy again today. So now I am up to two out of four, but I swear I am going to get the other two done tonight, because at this time of year this coat really has to be wearable. It is not like buttonholes take a long time to do, and it's not like I have anything more important to do this evening, so now that I have told the internet I am most definitely going to finish them. And I will report back tomorrow. Because what is NaBloPoMo if not an opportunity to record agonizingly detailed progress on all my projects?

There sure is a lot less to write about when I've been at work all day, especially since I only talk about work in the vaguest of terms. But today I am going to write regardless of whether I have anything to write about, and since the question has been asked recently I will explain what it is that I do as a book conservation technician.

(I do really wish there were a more concise or self-explanatory title for my job, but "conservator" and "bookbinder" both imply a certain type of training or degree that I don't really have. Conservators have degrees in book or paper conservation. Bookbinders have some kind of training or apprenticeship in that craft. I, on the other hand, have a degree in librarianship, which I am presently not using at all. I've taken some bookbinding workshops and had some job experience in book conservation, and that is how I got to be where I am.)

So, I work in a university library in a conservation lab. A lot of my co-workers, those who are legitimate bookbinders, do repair work on the books themselves. I do a little of that, but I spend more of my time making phase boxes for the books that are too brittle to repair. Phase boxes get spine labels and sit on the shelf just like regular books, so people can browse the shelves and find them, but the box protects the book from becoming more damaged and keeps covers and loose pages from getting lost. I make the boxes in batches, but each one is made exactly the right size for its book so that the book doesn't rattle around inside. I also make labels for the boxes and for books that have had their spines repaired so that they need new labels. There are lots of other protective coverings and things that I make, which would be boringly specific to go into, but on a day-to-day basis boxing and labelling are the tasks I devote the most time to. The other half of my job is repairing newspapers that are going to be microfilmed. Often the newspapers are very large and very brittle, so this can be a tedious process. I flatten them out and repair any tears so that the microfilmers can get a clear shot of the text.

What I love about my job is getting to work with my hands every day. At the end of my shift, I have a pile of things that I've made. I work with a lot of really interesting people, in an environment where we can chat and be productive at the same time.

What I also love about my job is what I'm not doing. I'm not sitting at a desk. I'm not answering a phone (well, occasionally). I'm not dealing with customers. I only use a computer rarely. (Obviously I have a hearty fondness for computers, or you wouldn't all be reading this, but I think if I sat at one all day it would eat my soul, or something.)

So that is my job, and it is probably the most I will ever say about my job in this forum.

Don't worry, I'm not going to count that "technical difficulties" business as my post for the day. I promised I'd tell you about the soup if it came out well. It did! It also made my not-totally-recovered stomach very unhappy with me later, but whatever. It was totally worth it.

The recipe is from This Can't Be Tofu, by Deborah Madison, which, as promised, is a cookbook I actually do like. It was recommended to me by Rabi, ages ago, because she is forever posting photos of really delicious-looking vegan food, which really makes me curse my own laziness for not bothering to make myself tasty, healthy food more often. It also made me curse my inability to do anything interesting with tofu, until I asked her how she managed it, and she suggested this book.

(See how I keep slipping in links to my favorite blogs? Maybe that'll be an ongoing theme for the month.)

At first I found the basic techniques section at the beginning helpful for figuring out how to get tofu to turn all golden brown and crispy, the way it is at Thai restaurants. I had assumed that that was done by frying the tofu in oil, but whenever I tried, it didn't work. It stayed all white and floppy and just got... warmer. And oilier.

So I read the cookbook and it told me to fry the tofu. In oil. "About five minutes on each side," it said. Well, the cookbook SAID so, so it MUST work, I told myself, and set off to the kitchen to make my tofu brown and crispy, dammit.

After the ensuing battle, the tofu was brown and crispy. I also learned what I was doing wrong:
1. Being a wuss. To brown things, oil has to be hot, not vaguely lukewarm. The problem with hot oil is that it makes popping and snapping noises sometimes, and also leaps out of the pan and attacks you if you drop something in it wrong, and makes me think I am going to burn down the building at any moment. But you know what? Once you come to terms with all those things, you realize it's really good at cooking stuff!
2. Being neurotic. I realized that five minutes is a REALLY long time to stand there and not poke the tofu, or turn over the tofu, or poke it some more just to make absolutely sure it isn't sticking, or maybe move it around a little, or perhaps flip it again, or poke it some more, and dude, why has it hardly cooked yet? Oh, maybe because I keep pulling it out of the pan and peering at it. Right.

After that was solved, this became the book I turn to when I am bored of stir-fries and I want to do something different with tofu. Like make red curry soup with butternut squash and lime, and also tofu. The problem with making soup just for yourself is that there is no recipe which makes small batches of soup, so now I have enough to last me for the next three months. Except that I have nothing to store it in besides the pot I cooked it in, and since I would like that to not live in the fridge for the next decade, I am going to be having that soup every day next week for lunch at work. And maybe sometimes for dinner too.

(I had planned all along to bring the soup to work next week, but as I was going to package it up last night, I realized that I had no good container for carrying liquids to work, so I made an emergency trip to Bed Bath and Beyond today to acquire some kind of fancy leakproof thermos-like object. I got one, but I am still skeptical of its leak-proof-ness. I have been skeptical of thermoses since first or second grade, since I cannot ever remember having a thermos that did not leak milk everywhere. It was a truly icky problem, and I do not relish facing this issue again, but I keep telling myself that this thing I bought today has a five-year warranty of leak-proof-ness and that probably it is higher quality than that Barbie one. But I will keep you posted.)

For the record, this is not usually a cooking blog. Let's see if we can't delve into some other topics next week, or something.

(And if anyone was wondering, I did manage to salvage the last post, the topic of which was something like "Apple Muffins, and also Why I Hate Mark Bittman," with the assistance of Dave and my mother, after I had nearly resigned myself to it being gone FOREVAR into the vast pit of the internet, and that is a long story and also a boring one, the moral of which is to always back everything up all the time. And I think I was telling you this just to let you know that I will re-add that post as soon as I get a chance, but now I have to go bring some chocolate banana bread to some poets, and possibly bring a poem too if I am really, really together, and is it me or are my sentences really extra long today?)

If things look funny over here today, it is because something very, very strange is happening with my blogware. If I am unable to keep posting here, further posts for NaBloPoMo will happen over at my page on the NaBloPoMo site, and I'll add them to Age-Old Songs when things are less wonky.

If you tried to post a comment and failed, I am sorry! Thanks for trying!

Also, there was a post yesterday. Seriously. Come back, yesterday's post!

I am sitting here drinking chai and eating hot-from-the-oven apple muffins. It feels like the perfect way to say "screw you" to the bleak raininess outdoors.

The muffins came out very well -- not that I am surprised, exactly, because the last two times I made this recipe they also came out very well, and received many a compliment from the poetry group that I impress with my baking more often than with my wordsmithery. But this time I substituted whole wheat flour for half the flour called for, and nothing bad happened as a result, so I'm counting it as a win for my improvisation skills, even though substituting flour is not exactly rocket science.

Baking is one type of cooking where I am really uncomfortable improvising and making substitutions. Well, to be fair, baking is one type of cooking where I feel more uncomfortable than usual with improvising and making substitutions. Realistically I am only gradually learning to let go of the recipe-as-lifeline approach to cooking. I had a boyfriend once with whom I liked to cook, but we drove each other crazy with our differing styles. We would find a recipe that looked promising, and then he would change little things here and there, while I could be heard in the background saying "but it CALLS for MUSHROOMS! We don't HAVE mushrooms! I need to GO GET MUSHROOMS!" despite the fact that we had other perfectly edible vegetables around that would work just fine, and probably needed to be used up, anyway. For the record, his improvisations generally worked out very well. Also, I have loosened up significantly since that time. (Really.)

But not as far as baking is concerned. The inner workings of the baking process are a mystery to me. I slavishly follow recipes because, to be honest, I do not know what it is that baking soda or baking powder do, at all, and I have learned through painful experience that arbitrarily substituting whole wheat for white flour sometimes results in hard, dry, spooky objects which don't really resemble baked goods so much as masonry. Yeast is yet another mystery, and I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to make a yeast bread and ended up with a really dense floury object which could probably be used to construct buildings. Part of the problem there is that there is no way to know in advance if your yeast is dead. It is a guessing game. This guessing game is most easily solved by buying yeast in packets rather than jars, so that it remains completely sealed until the moment of truth when you are ready to bake, but THEN you realize with horror that the instructions on the yeast packet and the instructions in the recipe pertaining to the use of yeast ARE NOT THE SAME. Then you bite your nails and try to decide which one is right, the recipe or the yeast packet, knowing that one decision is going to leave you with dough which will stubbornly refuse to rise, but by the time you know this it will be TOO LATE. It is enough to make you go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, already.

So I am incredibly pleased about my half-whole-wheat muffins. They are based on a recipe from my mother's Betty Crocker cookbook. I have that cookbook How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, but after some fairly mediocre baking resulted from it, I started calling my mother for recipes whenever I wanted to bake. Actually, let me vent about my feud with Mark Bittman for just a moment. I have owned this cookbook for two years now, and I have found it useful for the following things:

1. Chocolate brownies
2. Apple crisp
3. Instructions on cooking asparagus

Now, it's not that I haven't looked at the cookbook for other things. It's really my only all-purpose cookbook, as all the others are vegetarian-specific and therefore don't really have standard recipes for biscuits and stuff. But every time I used Mr. Bittman's instructions for such items, I'd think "well, that turned out okay, but my mom can make it way better," at which point I'd call her and ask how Betty Crocker would advise me to make it, because she is a cook who knows what she's talking about.

My next point of issue with Mr. Mark Bittman (I have taken to calling people Mr. Full Name when I am mad at them, which I think started around the middle of the baseball season when an underperforming Julio Lugo made a really stupid steal attempt and became known to me as Mr. Julio Lugo for the next few months) is that his cookbook does NOT tell you how to cook everything. Well, obviously, you might say, but I mean, there is a difference between not being able to include everything in the world and deliberately omitting something obvious because you are spiteful and annoying. Case in point: pasta salad.

You will find pasta salad in the index of How to Cook Everything. But when you turn to page 111, you find the following passage, under the section called "Grain Salads":

A note about pasta salads. Cold pasta is a fact of life, and -- if not overcooked to begin with and rinsed of excess starch and dressing -- it can make a decent addition to any salad. To me, however, it makes no sense to intentionally cook pasta for salad. Grains such as rice, barley, and quinoa keep better, retain their structural integrity better (that is, they don't fall apart), taste better, and offer better texture -- they are not at all gummy -- than cold pasta. So if you have some leftover pasta you want to integrate into a salad, by all means go ahead. But don't set out to make "pasta salad."

Now, of course the man is entitled to his opinions regarding what makes a good salad. But don't tell me not to make pasta salad, either. Your esteemed opinion is not going to make me humbly submit to your salad standards, it is just going to make me get my pasta salad recipe from another cookbook (i.e. phone Mom, inquire after the good Ms. Crocker's opinion). As an added bonus, I may dropkick your weighty but pasta-salad-less tome across the room. You do not get to call your book How to Cook Everything if you are going to snobbishly omit common foods. You get to call it something like How to Cook Everything, Except Pasta Salad, Because I'm Incredibly Pompous and Also I Hate Picnics.

Whew. Glad I got that out of my system.

Point the third: Mr. Mark Bittman seems to believe that everyone owns a food processor. Everyone does not own a food processor. I hope to someday, but I consider it a luxury. I also consider it something that is likely to be abused by clueless roommates, so I'm inclined to get one at such time as I do not have to share my kitchen with people I don't have a great deal of faith in. So, it is a bit offputting when you are instructed to make everything from dough to soup in your food processor, and find that instead of making your recipe in the advertised 20 minutes, you are still sitting there an hour later, glumly shredding your vegetables with a peeler. If everything is going to involve a food processor, you need to be like other appliance-based cookbooks (slow-cookers, breadmakers) and say so in your title, which at this point is How to Cook Everything, Except Pasta Salad, Using A Food Processor.

Finally, there is the meat issue. Like any standard cookbook, there is a large section on cooking meat, which as a vegetarian I have no use for. That's not something I was particularly offended by, until I saw in the bookstore a few weeks ago that Mr. Mark Bittman has a new book out, called How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which I'm pretty sure he wrote just to spite me, knowing perfectly well that it would make me feel very grumpy about the amount of bookshelf space I have devoted to meat cooking, which if I had just waited two years, could have been avoided. (Of course, that shelf space still would have been filled with mediocre food-processor-based pasta-salad-free recipes, so it's not like I would buy this one anyway, but still. It's like the man hates me or something.)

Okay. I totally didn't mean for this post to turn into a grumpy book review. I am off to make that red curry butternut squash soup now, and if that comes out well, I'll tell you about a cookbook that I actually like. I promise.

I have had a lazy week. I meant to (1) finish sewing the buttonholes for my Coat Project, (2) make lunches for the week, (3) make some kind of Red Sox victory cookies to bring to work, (4) make an invitation for next year's family reunion, (5) watch the stuff that came in from Netflix, and (6) do laundry. Guess which of those actually happened.

If you guessed (5), you'd be right.

On Monday I did actually do some sewing while watching Stranger than Fiction. Tuesday, though, I somehow managed to kill the whole evening surfing around the NaBloPoMo site, and also watching House. Wednesday and Thursday were devoted to the internet, and also Firefly. Each day this week, I was exhausted when I came home from work, convinced myself not to take a nap so that I'd be able to sleep later, and then somehow hit a second wind right around ten when I had been planning to go to bed, and therefore tossed and turned and listened to the gerbils for a while before finally managing to sleep sort of restlessly all night. I've also felt vaguely ill all week, with my entire digestive system being fussy for no reason.

This is turning into a really whiney post.

The point is, it is Friday! I have the whole weekend ahead of me, so my master plan is that tonight I am going to come to terms with being lazy. I am going to have dinner, watch Hotel Rwanda, which is my most recent Netflix delivery, and maybe read a bit more of The Satanic Verses, before sleeping as much as I want to. Like, until it is light out. I do not like getting up in the dark, unless it is to get an early plane flight to somewhere interesting. Which is just not a happening thing right now.

Tomorrow, after I sleep in, I will bake some apple muffins using my one remaining apple (which, if it sits around much longer, won't be terribly usable). Then I will sew those buttonholes, probably while lying around listening to music. Later I will make this recipe for curried butternut squash soup that I found recently, and save the leftovers for lunches next week. The remains of some tropical storm are supposed to be raging through tomorrow, so it seems like a good day for soup.

Sunday I will relish my Extra Hour of Sleep (yay Fall Back!) and then make chocolate banana bread to bring to poetry group. A while back, Moose posted this excellent recipe for chocolate banana bread, which is delicious, and sort of like a banana split, except that since it is BREAD you can call it breakfast, which is harder to justify with an actual banana split. (Incidentally, you should all go read Moose. She is highly amusing, and also posted about digestive system issues recently, except that when she wrote about it, it was funny. Go there now.)

Aaaand now that you are back I can finish my boring to-do list: then I'll do some laundry and make a stir-fry of some sort because there are vegetables lying around that need eating, and probably do some more reading, and then I will go to poetry group and impress people with delicious bread (it could be argued that I should try to impress them with a poem, but bread is way easier, and have we discussed how I've been lazy this week?)

And I'll be blogging. Of course. And I swear it will not be more to-do lists, because I have a whole list of topics here that I want to write about, and I would have chosen one of them for today except that once I got home I declared that tonight is Official Laziness Night. You see how it is.

Remember that time that a squirrel ate out of my hand? Well, I thought it was an isolated incident, but that is probably because I wasn't wandering around trying to get rid of spare cookies for a while after that. But a few weeks ago, I made some apple muffins with walnuts on top, and in the process of eating them I decided that I preferred them without walnuts and picked all the walnuts off. I saved them, though, and figured I'd toss them to the next squirrel I saw.

On lunch break, I saw a squirrel in a tree near my building, so I clucked at him to get his attention, figuring I'd toss the walnuts near the base of the tree and he would hop down and get them. But when I clucked and reached into my bag, he bounded enthusiastically down from the tree and across the path to sit in front of me, his big, brown, squirrelly eyes trained on my hand. Holy crap, I thought.

So I knelt down and reached out to give him a walnut, expecting him to grab the nut and go. But instead, he put his paw on my hand and nibbled the nut right from my fingers. After that, he took the other walnuts and dropped them by the side of the path, as though to stash them for later, before running back to see if I had anything more. "That's all, buddy," I told him. It's got to be the same squirrel as last time, I thought. I took to calling him Crazyface in my head, which is one of the pet names I use for the gerbils when they are being hyper.

Crazyface lives in the garden of the building next to the one I work in, with another squirrel who is much more shy. The other squirrel, who I call Captain Skittish, won't come near me to get food, but if I get his attention and throw something to him, he'll hop down from his tree and grab it. You know, like a normal squirrel.

The next day before work I stopped to get a donut for breakfast, and figured I'd walk over to my building and share a bit with Crazyface before I went in. Sure enough, he was lurking around a nearby tree, and when I clucked to him he scampered right over. I broke off a piece of my donut, and he took it from me and nibbled, and then... put it down.

"What? You don't like donuts? What is wrong with you?" I asked in disbelief, but he just hopped off to the garden, presumably in search of a more nutritious breakfast. I crumbled the donut piece and left it for the sparrows, which are apparently less fussy. (Captain Skittish was nowhere to be found, or I would have tossed it to him. He would have eaten it.) Meanwhile, everyone at the University presumably decided that I was insane, since I was just standing there chatting with nearby wildlife.

Later, I told my squirrel-feeding co-worker about it. "I wonder if it's the same one I ran into the other day," she said. "That one refused a cookie." Another co-worker said "You got snubbed by a squirrel? Oh, snap!" So I left the squirrels alone for a while, since apparently they don't care for my food anyway, THANKS A LOT, GUYS.

But then yesterday I was outside, eating lunch and enjoying the good weather, when I saw one of them lurking around the garden nearby. "Crazyface?" I called, clucking, but he only looked at me warily. It was definitely Captain Skittish. I tossed some pieces of bread in his general direction. "Come on, buddy. It has pesto!" Eventually he came close enough to grab a piece from my hand and then dash off. I figured that was good enough for me.

Today, though, I wasn't planning on feeding squirrels at all, and I was just sitting outside drinking an iced tea, when I saw one of them run by me and dash up a tree. I clucked halfheartedly -- all I had in my bag was a Reese's Crunch bar, not really good squirrel food, but it had peanuts in it, and maybe he'd want a little piece. The squirrel eyed me, but stayed up the tree, and I figured it was Captain Skittish for sure. Soon I saw why he'd run up the tree -- a big dog was going by, straining hopefully at his leash and looking at the tree the squirrel had hopped into. The squirrel never took his eyes off me, and after the dog had passed he ran back down the tree, jumped up onto the ledge I was sitting on, and came right up to me. "Hi, Crazyface," I said, pulling the candy bar from my bag. He tensed with anticipation as I opened the wrapper, and as soon as I had it open, he braced his paws against my hand and ripped a big bite off of the end. (I had been planning to break off a piece to give to him, so that we could SHARE the candy bar, but he was too fast for me. "Well, I guess it's all yours then," I said.)

He stayed right next to me, but turned his back on me to eat. I wondered if he'd let me pet him, and he did, grudgingly. (You can get away with a lot when you're still holding more than half of the delicious, delicious candy bar.) Then he turned back, and, bracing himself against me again, yanked the rest of the candy bar out of its wrapper. (I never get over the delight of feeling his paws on my hand. It's just so weirdly trusting.) Then he hopped a few yards away to finish it. That was when I was smart enough to get out my phone and take a picture:



I feel guilty feeding him all these empty calories what with winter coming on and all. Maybe I'll start carrying trail mix around to share with him. (But who knows, maybe he'll be fussy and snub me again.)

earlier -- later